Good and Twenty: The Rockets take a place in NBA history

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The Lakers, you just know, are aching to be the team to break the streak.

This is how it is now for the Rockets and how it will be until the streak that has become of the talk of the NBA in an unusually eventful season finally ends.

It is at 20 consecutive games now, topped only by the Lakers of Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West and Gail Goodrich, matched only by the Bucks of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson.

Theirs is just a regular-season accomplishment, but it is an accomplishment that puts the Rockets in company with the greatest teams and players there have ever been. When other teams put runs together and the charts start coming out of the greatest winning streaks in NBA history, these Rockets will be there, again and again, as it has been for the Lakers and Bucks of another generation.

“You got to think of all the great players and great teams that have been in this league,” Tracy McGrady said. “To be on a team that has accomplished 20 straight wins, this has to be up there as the most gratifying thing I’ve accomplished in this league. You look at the Bulls that were 72-10 that year. They did do this. So this is pretty remarkable.”

It is also the best story of an unbelievable season.

This had been the season with the incredible, ground-shaking trades of Shaquille O’Neal and Jason Kidd and Pau Gasol. It has been the season in which Kobe Bryant went from demanding out of LA to guiding the Lakers to the top of the West. It has been the season of the three-pronged revival of the Celtics.

But now, it is the season of the streak, with the Rockets’ run of consecutive wins reaching 20 games becoming the NBA’s longest in 37 years and at least for now, eclipsing all those remarkable stories.

They come to town now, and teams want to measure themselves against the team that has not lost since January. Fans bring signs to the arena about the other team. National sports reports start with the update of the streak.

The Rockets don’t have teams defeated before the game begins like the Celtics of the 70s or the Bulls of the 90s. They don’t inspire that sort of awe. It’s more admiration and appreciation. There is not a sense that this is one of the greatest teams that have ever been, as the early 70s Lakers and Bucks were.

But even that seems to make it all more impressive, more special, as if rather than doing this with an unmatched collection of sublime talent, they do it with determination and consistency beyond the rest of the league.

There is still much to do this season. The showdown on Sunday against the Lakers will likely be for first in the Western Conference with the Rockets’ win on Wednesday putting them second, one game behind the Lakers. And then there is still the matter of the post-season and the search for a series victory now more than a decade long.

There is, however, no diminishing this accomplishment. They are special now, inspiring the best kind of adulation the NBA can offer. Respect.